Thursday, May 23, 2013

My Racist Neighbor - A Porn review.

To be fully honest with you I’m not sure why I downloaded
this. If I recall correctly I was herpin’ and derpin’ on the pirate bay and
clicked over on their top 100 drawn pornography section and the title caught my
eye for being silly and whatever. Imagine my surprise when I downloaded it and
found out it was some godawful nonsense No, I wasn’t surprised. Shitty crap is
the norm for this stuff.

Let’s get the trigger warning here out of the way, because I
want to put up the cover for this.

Trigger warning: Racism, Incest,
almost certainly nonconsensual sex, more racism. Really this whole thing is
just bad racial porn with incest and rape thrown in to differentiate
following issues from previous ones.

Wham. Check that out. Mister generic Asian stereotype is
staring up at teenage redhead with giant tits and NO PUPILS. Goodness that art
is just so bad. Her knees are like little boils on her flesh colored
butterknife legs. He has one gigantic contiguous tooth and some random thing
poking out of his backpack. That pole is a grey gradient leading to an entirely
too small sign that’s poorly typeset. Ah but whatever man drawn porn is
whatever. Let’s see how bad slopehead gooky gookerson is written up.

Oh heavens, it’s in sketchy style. This is actually somewhat
better than the cover okay, kinda cartoony but hey. Also it looks like it was
almost certainly scanned and uploaded to mangastudio. Cool beans. So Chinky
McNip here is a genius device builder because that is what Asians are good at
and he is also a horny voyeur because Asians and nerds are a shy meek folk.
Basically if you build stuff and are smart you’re socially debilitated. This is
incidentally why iron man is so popular. He’s a power fantasy of not being a
complete social fuckup. I want to be clear early on that I don’t mean to sound
really bad about Asians here, and all of those words are not good words to
describe people with, but this is not a person, this is a racist caricature created by a white man
with a large drawn penis and it’s of utmost importance that we do not under any
circumstances respect him or his creation. Call it what it is. I mean check that
shit out he’s flying his little camera-copter out of a house designed like a
traditional Japanese castle. There is nothing respectable about it.

Anyway the little chinaman has been obsessed with his white
neighbor since she forgot to wear panties that one time he was looking up her
skirt because also that is what Japanese people do, look up skirts. And take a
lot of photos. I’m telling you it’s like a fucking cornucopia of racist
nonsense. Also it’s bizarre as heck that Sharona doesn’t react to the midget
beneath her, but I’m pretty sure the comic is trying to imply that she forgot
her panties on purpose and is totally into it.Also they're both hecka underage. AND SHE STILL HAS NO EYES.

See, the CG sound effects and rigid box and panel lines are
what convinces me this was done in mangastudio. Further evidence we’re to
conclude she’s an exhibitionist, yelling out of her window in a transparent
negligee. The jap clearly does not understand our bizarre cultural hinting.

One of the biggest offenders of terribly written porn is bad
puns. I could live without ever reading another bad pun in a porn comic. I
would prefer to live that way. Also, that’s exactly the face I make when I
masturbate too, so props for realism.

Also this stuff. It’s silly, especially since we already
know she’s an exhibitionist. The very next page: “Might as well be completely
naked. I’m not going to let this paranoia crap take over. Nobody’s watching.”
Seriously.

Okay so his name is Wong. That sounds acceptably fucking
racist. Wong’s penis is about the length of his forearm+hand. He is a midget
so that might only translate into… say 12 inches or so, but on an average
human? That’s having a dick up to your collarbone. Also those fucking puns.

Motherfucker. Just because you know you’re a fucking asshat
doesn’t make you not one. Yeah that’s just the first issue, I’m covering the
six I have. Somehow this asshole makes money on this shit.

I want to be clear here: I have nothing against racially
motivated pornography. Skin color and different cultures can be exotic and
ultimately erotic, and when it comes to the constructions of pornography
there’s a certain layer of abstraction that divorces the concept from day to
day practices of colonization. Tasteful mixed race pornography can and is made.
This, however, is not that. This is not a racial pornography that treats its
objects as people or as even particularly desirable; this is a racist
caricature finding desire in a white woman, reproducing an expected attitude
about the world that has existed for the last 500 or so years.

Interestingly, this is a rather popular category of
pornography, primarily black dudes on white ladies with an emphasis on “giant
black cocks.” It’s basically a reenactment of everything that society still to
this day teaches us about who black men are and the value of white women. Which
is probably bad. Anyway check it out this woman still doesn’t have eyes.

“Math is soooooo hard” well good I’m glad we know she lives
up to the hegemonic girl. But anyway here’s some new characters: her mom who is
apparently a bitch as noted by her angry eyes and general angular appearance
(women are supposed to be rounded, see) and her dad who looks like Mario, if
Mario had a daughter he did inappropriate things with. Also what is that on the
tv? The first one is football, but the second two are… brokeback mountain and
some kind of dude handholding?

In this world, of course, reaching up your daughter’s skirt
is “adoring” and also incest fantasies with Mario are pretty common. Looks like
we’re back to football on the tv though.

Of course the 3 people paying for this aren’t paying for
story, so we gotta have some sex on each page. Angry eyes mom seems like the
most thoroughly ungracious hostess since Cruella DeVille tried to buy her
guest’s dogs to make a coat with. Or something, I don’t recall. The next couple
of pages are more of this kid’s sex fantasies.

Mario the incestor is jealous. But what is this constant
vaginal leakage? Why is she always wearing buttfloss? What the fuck happened to
her lips? And her fucking eyes are gone again? This is a goddamn trainwreeeeck.

Oh ho! Plot twist! Perspective change! Wang’s dick shrank!
Though I think this seals the deal on whether or not she knew what she was
doing.

This kid thinks vulvas are Elysium holy hell. The next
couple of pages are a series of sex fantasies involving Shanona’s entire
family, completing the narrative crescendo. It’s actually pretty elegantly
designed. First we introduce the characters and Chong fantasizes having sex
with each of them, then he fantasizes about them individually sexing Sheena,
then he fantasizes about a group bukkake orgy. What makes this issue slightly
better is that Ping could be of any race and it would still work. Racism is no
longer the focus

God dammit.

One of the weirder occurrences in the drawn porn world is
the shuffling of responsibilities. This being pornography and not any other
form of media, burnout is pretty high and a lot of paid porn artists are just
artists that need to make money until they can get a design job somewhere.
Anyway at this point I’m pretty sure this series was profitable enough that jab
could pay some other people to do things he clearly didn’t like to do.

Drawn porn as an internet business is a difficult
proposition. Already you have the difficulty of running a creative digital
works business, but you have that while also existing in a sphere where the
majority of materials are expected to be free. Pornography in general is
treated as a collection of objects of little value and prosecutors rarely take on actual cases
of pornography copyright violations. Tasteful society hates porn because it’s a
taboo thing and since tasteful society hates it, it has none of the protections
tasteful society would grant it. This means that yukity yuks like myself can
and will pirate all the pornography no matter how much work is put into
creating it and there’s essentially nothing that creators can do about it. SOPA
and its cohort are uninterested in the parties of people less influential than
the MPAA or RIAA.

Kay so his dick hangs at his knees when flaccid. Given that
he’s probably about 4 feet tall I’m pegging it at around 16 inches hard.

So I guess this new writer is into the racist stuff again.
That little pose wing is doing is a pose of surprise that shows up in a lot of
manga. This colorist is pretty decent. The overall art for this is far from the
stuff that shows up on “fuck yeah bad art” tumblrs. Well most of the art is.

Jesus fucking Christ.

I guess we’re to understand that sharona’s family is kind of
a redneck family? Of gingers? Anyway wow check out this woman assert her bodily
autonomy what a bitch. I wouldn’t fuck a guy who called it “dessert” either.
And this kid still cannot stop fantasizing about every damn thing. He’s a nerd,
see, and nerds are desperate virgins and not capable of initiating sex. Yay
nerd stereotypes!

Of course sharona, who is into fong, asks him whether her
boobs are too big. Yes that is actually a question she asked in a society and
medium that values breastflesh as the whole of a woman’s worth. And just to
reiterate her bumpkinness and Chang’s intelligence, the author used a thesaurus
and found a big word for Ling to say. Lovely.

This page suffers from some real lack of contextual reality.
I guess they start cuddling and making out? Or at least licking each other’s
tongues, which is what heterosexual male artists associate with making out. And
then bam no clothes. And she’s getting pre-jizz on his toe. Maybe the next page
will clear it up.

No, this is even more confusing. First off his dick must be
bending horribly in half in the first panel, slamming into her lungs in the
second and once again broken in half in the third. This artist genuinely seems
not to understand that dicks don’t just stick straight out perpendicularly to
your body. Also he just had raucous sleep sex with a chatty partner. Feng has
issues. And so do we, three more to go.

Oh hey good everyone gets in on the incest party with the
Chinese sex dwarf. Looks like jab is back to writing this, so look out for more
racist caricature, but at least he got a letterer so I don’t have read FUCKING
COMIC SANS any more.

A big part of the reason that this kind of ridiculously
offensive shit can exist in pornography is tied to the previously mentioned
undergroundness of pornography as a whole. Porn exists in a sphere of already
being morally bad from the get go, so adding more morally bad things doesn’t
really affect its standing in society. No anti-porn advocate or general
adherent to the strong desexualization of day to day activities will decide
that this porn is better than that porn simply because that porn features racism while this porn does not. For a great deal of
people and in a great deal of general thought, all porn is equally heinous.

Oh well damn that’s some tiny lettering on some big pages.
How fucking annoying. Also that entire first panel makes me want to hop on a
plane and fly to brazil and cockslap jab more than any of the other fucking
travesties of human behavior on display here. “Even though I was no longer a
virgin, That morning I was still unaware of this grand revelation of not being
one. For me, Sharona was still that unattainable creature that was just steps
away from my home. I considered our lives vastly seperated [sic] by not just
class but by culture.” This, folks, is what it sounds like when a blithering
fucking moron writes as though he’s a super nerd geek intellectual. I like the
attention to detail with the tiny shiro mailbox.

Oh my god. Seriously it’s like all this guy knows about
everything east of iran is cobbled together from mulan and pokemon.

Well. Uh. I guess Mario has a giant penis also. None of
what’s happening here is close to realistic accept in cases of pretty extreme
sexual abuse.

This is really what happens when you try to graft some kind
of normal humpty dumpty story onto a piece of pornography. You get some
ridiculous fucking shit like this.

Which only gets more ridiculous when the characters feign
resistance. This kid just fantasized about every member of sharona’s family and
was party to his father fingerbanging his mom like an hour ago. Why would his
mom coming in and telling him a story of her own incestual relationship with
her father be all that unusual?

Similarly if you’re already used to showering with your
daughter in the nude why would you feign discomfort with her jacking you off
and then later the two of you banging?

What’s interesting about it though, is the way the false
resistance is constructed. Look how terrified Peng is here and at Mario’s sort
of half-hearted resistance. They’re the calm rational ones thinking through the
implications of the behavior. The women in both incest situations are simply horny
sex creatures willing to do whatever to get a good fuck. They want that dick
and don’t care about the resistance. In the context of this comic, with its
frustrated Asian nerd stereotype, this represents a need for women to provide a
sort of sexual release and to lift the responsibility for that release from
men. The women are driving the encounters, leaving the men to avoid having to
see their actions as having consequences.

Then of course for no apparent fucking reason the comic ends
in a bizzare shared hallucination after they have sex with their respective
parents and realize they love each other. Seriously this is some table-flipping
shit.

I have to wonder if this became like a huge seller or
something, synonymous with the high quality Jab name.

The previously mentioned lack of distinction is of course
not true within the world of pornography enjoyment, or what could be termed
“porn culture” or what is very specifically the discursive interactions between
people who enjoy pornography online. This is an eclectic group, usually divided
by interest, since each person has their own kinks. Each person also has their
own standards of pornography enjoyment, certain things that are acceptable to
enjoy and certain things that are not. In general though there is a pervasive
feeling of “leave well enough alone” throughout the online community. Sure this
guy is doing racist incest comedy, whatever just don’t look at it. A big part
of this is the internet-wide adherence to a concept of “all speech is
acceptable.” It’s not true for the whole internet or for every subject, but it
is a conceptual driving force for political action on the internet, much like
the concept of democracy’s primacy is a driving force for U.S. politics.

So what’s funny about all this incest weirdness is that this
is literally like 2 days after the first issue. And Chiang here is still pretty
pathetic. I can’t believe people pay to read nervousness. If I wanted that I’d
go outside and try to talk to a pretty girl. This little racist stereotype is
more oblivious than I have ever been thank god.

This entire issue is actually kind of depressingly weird,
where this lady is trying so hard to meet the lady standard of not just ripping
his pants off and fucking him and little Wei there is just acting like the most
autistic child this side of chrischan.

Seriously it’s like fuckin’ hell damn. Jesus kid.

And then the wheels fall off and it starts making no sense.
He seems to think she’s been paralyzed from the waist down.

And then he seems to think that she’s asleep even while he’s
making a bunch of noise. And then she starts crying because he… I don’t fucking
know, fucked her while she pretended to be asleep? There is no logic in this
world. Seriously the rest of this issue is so hard to parse. Basically sharona
and peng both fuck their parents again and the two men again feign resistance.

We do learn that Chiao’s father is into anal and also MMMF
foursomes. This is important context!

Like seriously Jesus Christ Mario.

It think it’s pretty clear that jab was just going for a
typical ephebophile porn with a racist accent, but then the other authors
introduced some incestual themes and those sold better so now he’s sticking
with that. Porn as a business is pretty cynical.

Of course an adherence to “all speech is free” inspires a
certain mindset where criticism of any speech is an attempt at censorship by
people attempting to enforce their morals on other people. These “moralfags”
are considered anathema to the internet as a whole and this attitude generated
the concept of “white knights,” which is an insanely cynical idea that a person
only defends a thing/group because they want some benefit from that
thing/group. The internet being discursive and silly as it is, this cascades
into groups mocking the anti-moralists for being irrationally transgressive and
so on and so forth. Pornography is just as political as anything else.

I’m going to have to remember to make that face and tell
that to a sex partner someday. Again we continue the theme of “but she wants it” that guides Jab’s
storytelling here.

Mario finally quits. Took him long enough.

only to fuck his sleeping wife. I’m glad he has moral
standards enough to rape the one he married instead of the one he begat. Good
show.

Sorry, I got bored of ching. He’s been fucking his mom for
pretty much all of the previous. But lookout, cheating jerk dad is home! Drama!

Seriously this guy is the most guileless liar. And those
goddamn puns are back. And PLORT.

And mario’s moral compunctions went away again. See what
feminism does?! Seriously the rest of this issue is just them fucking and
falling asleep and fucking again and Lee doing the same to his mother. I’m kind
of glad it gave up having any real pretense at story about two issues ago, but
it makes the whole thing a lot harder to talk about.

---

So I mentioned briefly in the introduction to this kind of
thing that I’d be discussing pornographic markers. To be honest, I’m basically
just cribbing together what three things I remember from sociology of
sexuality, but the present thinking on it is that erotic space is strongly
separated from mundane space, largely because we do live in (this is a tired
cliché, but it’s a cliché because it’s true, not because writers are boring) a
puritanical country established with the idea that the only legitimate sexual
activity was that between a man and his wife for the sole purpose of
procreation. The erotic has no place outside of the sacred and legalistic bond
between spouses and it’s only in the last 50-odd years that it became
publically acceptable to acknowledge that the erotic existed.

This isn’t to say that people weren’t kinky as all hell or
didn’t produce and reproduce the erotic in all areas of their lives, it just
meant it wasn’t socially acceptable to talk about. One of the few generally
true things a person can claim about humanity as a whole is that if there are
rules or standards or customs, there are always people who are or act out
exceptions to those rules or standards or customs[i].
These people had to work within the confines of the society they existed in, so
often they developed euphemisms or signals or some form of semeiography for
those things that “public” society would disapprove of. In pornography this is
what I mean by pornographic markers.

One of the most obvious and prevalent pornographic marker is
nudity. Nudity in western society connotes a number of complicated ideas that
artists often enjoy exploiting, but first and foremost nudity is associated
with imminent intimate activity. Many pornographic works are upfront about the
nudity they contain, with nudity on the cover or at least featuring thoroughly
undressed subjects.The largest part of
this is the presence of exaggerated or emphasized primary and secondary sexual
features. In the case of primary features (bulging crotches, large testicles
and penises, large mons or vulva, pronounced clitoris) this probably has the
least semiotic distance from the actual referent. Sex bits are used primarily
for sex (secondarily for liquid waste evacuation) and so making those bits
obvious or noticeable by any means suggests that sex is imminent. It’s even
more so when those same parts are depicted in an aroused state (erect penis,
engorged vulva/clitoris). Secondary sexual characteristics are further away
from their referent, but are often the most commonly emphasized marker because
of their relative distance. This means the presentation of bodies that feature exaggerated
breasts, hips, buttocks, legs, or hairlessness in the case of women,
exaggerated musculature, wider shoulders, squared jaws and facial and body hair
in the case of men.

In both of these cases, the sexual presentation of the body
is of primary importance. There’s a strong reminder that the body is an object
to be used for sex and to derive sexual pleasure from. Pornographic markers
extend further than this, however, since there are plenty of situations where
less obvious presentations are important. Less obvious markers include the uses
of linguistic or artistic innuendo [Link to that burger king ad] to merely
suggest sexual activity without explicitly creating its immanency. This
definition covers a broad range of activity, from presenting people in
positions associated with sexual activity to making statements that could
potentially be recontextualized in a sexual situation (“that’s what she said”).

Anyway I’ve sort of written myself into a corner here.
Pornographic markers by themselves are pretty uninteresting and not quite what
I’m here to talk about. Knowing a basic definition of these markers is
important, though, since from there we can discuss how certain paraphilia
develop for the expression of those markers. Since the markers signify
something erotic is about to happen, they become intimately tied with the
erotic themselves, gaining the power of the situations they imply.

But that’s for another time. Here I want to talk about the
fetishization (making an object a fetish, an object with special powers. Fetish
here and in colloquial usage refers to that object having erotic power, but
fetish itself is a broader word) of the forbidden and exotic. In western
society, a great deal of sexual expression is itself taboo. The foundations of
incest fetishes thus come from more of a conflation of taboo and sexuality itself,
where all socially unacceptable things become somewhat erotic on the grounds
that the erotic itself is also socially unacceptable. This comic, while
depicting mostly heterosexual activity, plays on both the forbidden and erotic
natures of miscegenation and incest to form its expression of erotic desire. At
least, that’s one explanation.

What’s interesting about it also is the commercial nature of
the expression. Jab (there is some uncertainty about whether it should be JAB
or jab or Jab, so… yeah) has managed to wrest his career and moderate artistic
skill into an entire for-pay subscription based website that’s nearly a decade
old now. The site has expanded in egotistic ambitions, featuring a forum, a
blog, a 24/7 live chatroom, and of all things a wiki to catalogue the various
characters in his ongoing series. Humorously the disclaimer in the front page
of the site (a bumper page many porn sites use to nominally respect laws
requiring pornographic websites to check age before access) has a few specific
lines directed at lawyers and law enforcement2
that would not be enforced in any court across this land and have exactly as
much teeth as the “18+” guarantor.

The guy is paranoid, and not without reason. He’s making
real money (around $200,000 a year with 1,000 subscribers, if his forum is
anything to go by) off of creating socially unacceptable erotic situations,
frequently using characters that are clearly underage or from animated works
directed at children. It’s a weird space to occupy, but he’s far from the only
person doing it. Since it’s a commercial enterprise, JAB is to some degree at
the mercy of his customers, providing to them what they want. The reality
though is that the dialogue is more JAB providing what he thinks they want to
whomever he thinks are his customers. It’s JABcomix, and don’t you forget it.

Join us next weekish for another review.

1. And
those exceptions are rationalized and integrated as a component of the original
society until society has changed its rules or standards or customs. That’s one
theory about social change, anyway.

2. Most
notably:You WILL NOT enter the site if you are
acting, either in actual employment or otherwise, as an agent, lawyer, or
representative of Warner Brothers, Turner Inc., the Disney corporation, Capcom,
Archie, Sega, Neopets, or Nintendo. Persons presently affiliated with said
companies may only enter this site provided that they will do so on their
private time, for their private use, and will without exception keep the
knowledge of this site strictly to their private and personal dealings,
separate and unrelated to any dealings they might have with the respective
company or persons acting as representatives thereof.

And

Your interest in
this material is personal, and not professional. You do not work for law
enforcement. You are not accessing this material to use against the site
operator, or any person whomsoever, in any conceivable manner.